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RME teachers are under the most pressure, figures show

Staff left overstretched as their number drops at an ‘alarming’ rate while subject grows in popularity

Religious and moral education teachers are under more pressure than those in any other subject in the Scottish curriculum, a TESS investigation has revealed.

The analysis looked at the numbers of teachers for different subjects in 2008 and 2016, compared with the numbers taking the equivalent Higher a few months earlier.

The results suggest that RME has become much more stretched over that period than other subjects: while the number of teachers who have it as their main subject fell by 10 per cent, from 676 to 611, the number of Higher religious, moral and philosophical studies (RMPS) ...

Easier said than done

Performance in 2016’s Higher RMPS question paper was worse than the previous year, according to the SQA.

Many students left the exam confident, only to find that they had scored badly, partly because of a reliance on the “write everything you know” approach, the SQA’s report says.

RMPS’ growing popularity has, in the past, been attributed to a perception that it was an “easy” Higher. That argument is less persuasive now, however, with only 22 per cent of candidates achieving an A in 2016 – a lower proportion than English (26 per cent) and maths (31 per cent).

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